From avoiding the cannabis community to living up to claims that the campaign was catering to elite interests, Yes on 4 is an example of how not to run a drug-related referendum
I would have liked to see the faces of the people who ran the failed Yes on 4 campaign in Mass when the poll returns came in last night.
I would have liked to see them, but I wasn’t able to make that happen. Because unlike literally every other campaign I have written about over two decades of covering local and state politics here, the brain trust behind Massachusetts for Mental Health Options held a private election night party, at the Harvard Club in Back Bay, completely closed off to the press.
It was a unique if not perplexing move for a campaign that was accused of shilling for big-dollar drug interests and inaccessible boutique psychedelics service providers plus the patients who can afford costly treatments, and sadly it reflected much of what we’d seen from the parade of fools who failed the psychedelics movement so severely.
Even in a lefty legal weed state, it was never going to be easy to get people on board with the Legalization and Regulation of Psychedelic Substances Initiative. Drug policy reform is an extremely tough and messy business. It’s important to have stakeholders and voices from all corners of the question coalescing—in this case, people from across the psychedelics treatment and advocacy spectrum, ideally working with ground, online, and high-level operatives who truly know and care about the issue. But while MMHO appeared to have the resources and team to pull off such a juggling act, in practice, the Yes on 4 troupe dropped the ball.
I’m not here to call out individuals, or even to impugn the downtown consultants who orchestrated this disaster. I have no doubt that multiple thorough post-mortem accounts will come, including via Talking Joints Memo. For now, I simply want to get that conversation started with some observations I’ve had over the past several months, if not longer.
The first big head-scratcher for me came early this year, when a schism in the Massachusetts psychedelics movement led to the group Bay Staters for Natural Medicine criticizing the New Approach political action committee behind Yes on 4. The veracity of those criticisms as well as the later discrediting of the critics aside, it was beyond puzzling to watch the PAC take it on the chin. Instead of showing up in jeans and sneakers and reminding people of the hand it played in weed legalization, New Approach barely reacted as opponents painted them as everything from pharma dupes to suits and outsiders from Washington DC.
It’s not surprising that the PAC didn’t show up boasting its track record on weed. MMHO actively resisted any close affiliation with the industry or culture, eschewed the community, and was comically difficult to communicate with. I run the biggest site covering drugs in New England, and for several months at the beginning of this year I was unable to even get them to send me press releases. Again, mind-boggling irresponsibility, but it helps to explain how we got here.
And finally, where the hell was the campaign before October? What was it doing? It’s like they forgot they had a job to do all through the summer and were even reluctant to throw it into overdrive for most of fall. They finally got excellent commercials running toward the end, but by then it was too late.
All of which amounted to a major step back for the psychedelics movement at worst, or a massive waste of money at best. According to the latest numbers, which were published by the Office of Campaign and Political Finance on Tuesday, Massachusetts for Mental Health Options raised more than $3.7 million in 2024, bringing the group’s total contributions to $6.7 million. Meanwhile, their opponents, a loose amalgamation of conservative-contrarians and grifter prohibitionists known as the Coalition for Safe Communities, barely raised more than a hundred grand. The anti-psychedelics operatives ran a seemingly effective misinfo campaign and planted a few brain worms through the state and with the media, but their biggest advantage by far was the remarkable ineptitude of MMHO.
By comparison, the Yes on 5 contingent pushing for a minimum wage in the service industry raised slightly less than $1.8 million. They got haymaker’d and tossed across a crowded bar Miami Vice-style by a coalition of Trump-happy restaurant owners and the gullible servers they love to abuse, but at least they got outspent. Their foes, the brilliantly deceitful Committee to Protect Tips, raised $2.9 million.
With MMHO, the most frustrating part of so much seemingly imprudent spending is that the only people who were making progress and an effort to connect with voters where they are—whether at a cannabis event, at church, at several bar meetups that vols held on their own, or at peoples’ homes campaigning door to door—were volunteers! If anything worthwhile came from the botched MMHO effort, it’s the byproduct of connections made at the grassroots level. If there’s any hope for psychedelics in the Bay State moving forward, it’s with them leading the way while the paid ops lick envelopes.
For more than 50 years, one of the biggest criticisms of the psychedelics movement has been its inaccessibility to the common person. That perception comes in part from the experiments of 1960s counterculture icons like Huston Smith and Andrew Weil, whose entourage is often referred to as the Harvard Psychedelic Club.
Any decent effort to break away from that image would have involved reaching the masses beyond Greater Boston. Instead, Yes on 4 ran the kind of operation that held its final event—its spectacular loss party, as it turned out—at the Harvard Club, and not even the psychedelic one.
